Sunday, September 11, 2005
Till human voices wake us. I want to look again at the reluctance of schools, colleges, and universities to embrace new social software. As with the previous post, I'm taking the front page of universities or major university programs as my test case, for now.
Take the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, for example. The home page is largely static, with a left sidebar devoted to standard resource links, the center column offering links to the main programs, and the masthead giving the site a bit of flair with its three color photographs. The majority of the material is static -- today I see it is sunny and 62 degrees out in Berkeley, but otherwise I learn nothing from the left and center columns today that I could not have learned yesterday. The substance of the place endures, unchanging, in its web page.
But there is some daily activity in the right sidebar. A link to a featured program of the day (likely established in an automated rotation) appears near the bottom; most of the column offers brief links to press releases and upcoming events. These too are most likely automated -- fed from the database according to the page template. Like the other columns, they are written in the official voice, the voice of policy and public relations. Wander the site as long as you wish, but most pages are spoken by the official voices, the machinery of the institution. Our identity can only be known through official speech, Haas seems to be saying. We cannot trust ourselves to speak any other way. Or perhaps: There is no other kind of speech.
Yet there are other kinds of speech -- we all recognize this, and we tend to resist the voice of public relations and official speech in many areas of life. We teach our students and our children to test and even reject official speech. We give it the pejorative meaning of an otherwise honorable word: rhetoric.
Yet eventually you can find other kinds of voices on the Haas site. I found several one and two-sentence quotations from MBA students rotating automatically into the MBA portion of the site, as well as a collection of faculty accomplishments and feature articles on new faculty. But like the faculty features, the carefully chosen one and two-sentence quotations from MBA students are tidy and perfect. They carry the aroma of a freshly-printed promotional brochure or viewbook.
Sometimes the fingerprints of the marketing office are still on the site -- Saint Louis University's newish slogan, Where Knowledge Touches Lives, closes every page of the site, or almost does, because the slogan always ends with the trademark sign -- the little r inside a circle. There is a lack of confidence there, as if the institution had to purchase an identity to present in front of its real identity. That trademark sign, along with the slogan it unconsciously mocks, has got to go. The character of the institution may not be able to find its way onto the front page if it has to go there via the marketing office. Yet so much is at stake; what else does the institution dare do?
(Like Haas's MBA pages, SLU produces a glossy front page with beautiful brochure-like photographs and carefully chosen quotations from students on campus. They place these more prominently, as a clue that they know that the links to programs aren't enough to sell themselves.)
We've started hearing about weblogs being used for promoting a college or university. I'll be looking at those and thinking more about how a school might be able to risk speaking in something other than the official voice. [0 & P]
Take the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, for example. The home page is largely static, with a left sidebar devoted to standard resource links, the center column offering links to the main programs, and the masthead giving the site a bit of flair with its three color photographs. The majority of the material is static -- today I see it is sunny and 62 degrees out in Berkeley, but otherwise I learn nothing from the left and center columns today that I could not have learned yesterday. The substance of the place endures, unchanging, in its web page.
But there is some daily activity in the right sidebar. A link to a featured program of the day (likely established in an automated rotation) appears near the bottom; most of the column offers brief links to press releases and upcoming events. These too are most likely automated -- fed from the database according to the page template. Like the other columns, they are written in the official voice, the voice of policy and public relations. Wander the site as long as you wish, but most pages are spoken by the official voices, the machinery of the institution. Our identity can only be known through official speech, Haas seems to be saying. We cannot trust ourselves to speak any other way. Or perhaps: There is no other kind of speech.
Yet there are other kinds of speech -- we all recognize this, and we tend to resist the voice of public relations and official speech in many areas of life. We teach our students and our children to test and even reject official speech. We give it the pejorative meaning of an otherwise honorable word: rhetoric.
Yet eventually you can find other kinds of voices on the Haas site. I found several one and two-sentence quotations from MBA students rotating automatically into the MBA portion of the site, as well as a collection of faculty accomplishments and feature articles on new faculty. But like the faculty features, the carefully chosen one and two-sentence quotations from MBA students are tidy and perfect. They carry the aroma of a freshly-printed promotional brochure or viewbook.
Sometimes the fingerprints of the marketing office are still on the site -- Saint Louis University's newish slogan, Where Knowledge Touches Lives, closes every page of the site, or almost does, because the slogan always ends with the trademark sign -- the little r inside a circle. There is a lack of confidence there, as if the institution had to purchase an identity to present in front of its real identity. That trademark sign, along with the slogan it unconsciously mocks, has got to go. The character of the institution may not be able to find its way onto the front page if it has to go there via the marketing office. Yet so much is at stake; what else does the institution dare do?
(Like Haas's MBA pages, SLU produces a glossy front page with beautiful brochure-like photographs and carefully chosen quotations from students on campus. They place these more prominently, as a clue that they know that the links to programs aren't enough to sell themselves.)
We've started hearing about weblogs being used for promoting a college or university. I'll be looking at those and thinking more about how a school might be able to risk speaking in something other than the official voice. [0 & P]